"I would think RIAA would demand 3D scanner be illegal to own or operate as it is a device designed to circumvent "copy protection" known as "obsolescence.""
Not to mention circumventing Edison's original media lock technology:
"An adapter permitted Victor records to be played on an Edison Disc Phonograph, but Edison forbade the sale of an attachment that permitted his records to be played on competitorsâ(TM) machines."
Of course if you wanted to rip his competitor's discs, you'd probably be violating their EULA - the language doesn't seem to have changed much in a century:
'I wonder exactly how far medicine has been set back by this.'
No measurable distance. The summary is rather misleading and the arXiv article isn't exactly clear, either. The previous letter they reference (and co-author) is clearer:
Basically a couple of tiny fragments have been found in the public DNA sequence databases that were misclassified as human, presumably because they were derived from cDNA 'libraries' constructed from cells contaminated with mycoplasma. These sequences are NOT part of the reference human genome sequence. They exist only as small independent files supposedly representing fragments of genes expressed in human cells:
but really mapping to mycoplasma sequences. Unfortunately a commercial provider used one of these files in the (semi-automated) design of a microarray. A probe for a sequence like this (one of many thousands on the array) would generally be harmless, since it does not detect a human sequence. Rather embarrasingly, it did appear to give a positive result in some publicly available data sets from researchers who used the array. This suggests that the cells used by these researchers were also contaminated with mycoplasma. So the problem isn't so much an insidious 'in silico' contamination of databases by bug sequences, but rather the actual contamination of cell cultures by mycoplasma, which suggests sloppy lab technique and a lack of routine testing.
"Also, for you developers out there...can you imagine what would happen to your code if someone started randomly flipping bits in your machine's memory? Would it produce new, useful features? Of course not!"
'None of this has a hypothesis I'd be willing to put out, but I think studying first world humans misses some possible independent variables.'
They actually looked at one caucasian and one West African (Yoruba) family. A lot more will need to be analysed to see if the number of new mutations in the children are typical. The authors also recognise that "the distribution of mutation rates in the population could contain a long tail of relatively rare individuals with considerably higher mutation rates (perhaps as a result of genetic or environmental factors)".
'Outrageous is 16gb for $100. SD Cards are too mainstream.'
I suppose component cost has almost nothing to do with it. The 32Gb iPod Touch goes for $299. Sure, the iPhone costs more to make, but $450 more..? They charge whatever they can get away with charging, and the 32Gb phone is the 'premium' model.
'...wherein prior to initiating encryption of said data said further processing device initiates generation of a secure signature from said data and initiates encryption of said secure signature and storing of said secure signature along with said secure data; and in response to receipt of said signal to resume said task said further processing device initiates retrieval of said encrypted secure signature and decryption of said encrypted secure signature and following decryption of said encrypted secure data initiates generation of said secure signature from said decrypted encrypted data and S comparison of said generated secure signature with said decrypted secure signature; and in response to said generated secure signature not matching said decrypted secure signature said further processing device issues an signal to said data processor to indicate that said data has been tampered with; and in response to said generated secure signature matching said decrypted secure signature said further processing device resumes said task using said decrypted data; mists of dreams drip along the nascent echo and love no more. End of line.'
"Can someone please explain what is the difference between 3.0 and 2.6.40 ?"
Linus: The numbers all go to 3. Look, right across the git repository, 3, 3, 3 and... Interviewer: Oh, I see. And most kernels go up to 2.6? Linus: Exactly. Interviewer: Does that mean it's better? Is it any better? Linus: Well, it's one better, isn't it? It's not 2. You see, most blokes, you know, will be running 2.x. You're on 2.6 here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on 2.6 on your computer. Where can you go from there? Where? Interviewer: I don't know. Linus: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Interviewer: Compile it up to 3. Linus: 3. Exactly. One better. Interviewer: Why don't you just make 2.6 better and make 2.6 be the top number and make that a little better? Linus: [pause] These go to 3.
"It fits on the CD-R allright. For whatever reason, contents of our DNA compresses into a plain old zip file no worst than executables. 50% reduction in size is a fair bet."
I was sad enough to actually try this! UCSC has the genome in a 2 bit per base format (778 MB) which zip or gzip can compress to 675 MB, and 7-Zip to 617 MB. That's just the reference sequence of course - an individual (diploid) human genome has double this information capacity, but since most bases don't change, you can conveniently represent the variants by some sort of diff in very little space ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18996942 ) so the CD should still be enough to hold the lot.
"No one really knew how far redesigning Perl needed to go to achieve those philosophical goals until the RFCs and Apocalypses started pulling at loose strings in the sweater."
It's certainly easy to criticise all this with the benefit of hindsight - I don't imagine anyone at the time imagined it would turn out to be be such a long, drawn-out process.
No, I didn't mean forget about re-designing the language (and its implementation) altogether and just carry on building on the old, flawed foundation. The goals of Perl 6 seem entirely laudable. I just think that the way this has all been presented to the wider community over the past decade hasn't done Perl any favours. Somehow a (false) impression has been created that Perl 5 is in some sense deprecated, while Perl 6 is not ready. If Perl 6 had been presented from the start as an experimental 'sister language' (perhaps with a different name), rather than being named as Perl 5's successor over a decade early, perhaps the perception would now be different.
Far less significant changes than those that occurred between Perl 5.0 and 5.10 (or 5.14) have been honoured by major version bumps in other software packages, which at least serve to indicate that some new and exciting features are available (which is what I meant by 'better PR'). But this wasn't possible with Perl because a drastically changed language design had already been given the Perl 6 name. Isn't your term 'Modern Perl' itself a way of saying that things have changed a bit since 1993, even though we're still using 'Perl 5'?
"I was just going to say that back in about 2001 someone gave me advice not to learn Perl 5 because a Perl 6 release was imminent."
It's a shame that this 'Osborne effect' has hung over Perl for the last decade. I wonder how Perl 5 would now be perceived if Perl 6 had been given a different name and announced as a research project into language development, rather than the next version of Perl? With better PR, Perl 5.10 could easily have been 'Perl 6'.
All this tends to obscure the quet evolution of Perl 5 programming into what 'chromatic' and others are calling 'Modern Perl', using an idiomatic style that takes full advantage of recent language features (some borrowed from Perl 6) and CPAN to write efficient and maintainable code:
As always, a lot of the most active development is happening outside the core language. Anyone interested in some of the directions Perl 5 is going in today ought to check out projects like these:
"I want interesting British programming that I might not have seen otherwise."
Well, then we'd actually have to make some, which seems to be too much trouble these days. Dr Who is still OK, but here's the programme they run immediately before it in the UK:
'Dont Scare the Hare - Jason Bradbury presents an innovative family game show packed with humour and jeopardy, and featuring a 4-foot animatronic robot hare...Episode 4/9. Two teams of contestants battle angry frogs and laser-beamed carrots to win 15,000 pounds.'
It's probably 'interesting' after serious LSD intake, but then so is watching the clothes go round in the Economy Wash cycle on laundry day.
"With stuff like observing road signs, you can train yourself to be more attentive to them too. There's not that much point reading them every time on roads you know well, though being aware of possible new signs is useful."
"Cost saving 5 plank Fence - sensor detects position of person and moves fence accordingly...You might be asking 'why hasn't anyone thought of this before?' But the garden fence industry is very powerful and they kill any idea that would threaten their plank quantity sales."
Older readers may remember the excellent QNX Demo Disk, an OS on a bootable floppy complete with windowing system, file browser, editor, and a proper web browser:
'Was searching for Bin Laden news, found a program called "Fox Tab" in the search results, and discovered this PDF creation tool was actually a trojan.'
Even worse, I was searching for 'MILF' and I got a legitimate news story about Bin Laden:
'There's a perfectly good UI paradigm for the desktop that's been around since the 80's...With Windows, some things change sure, but the basic metaphor...has been perfectly good for years and people are used to it.'
So, with the dreaded Ribbon coming to Windows 8, the dumbed-down Gnome 3 or KDE4 desktop shipped as the default on a Linux distribution near you, and the awful Unity on Ubuntu, have we reached the stage where mainstream user interfaces have actually started to regress? The Xfce guys must be loving this! Meanwhile, imagine the interface hell we'll have when LibreOffice is inevitably ribbonized and Ubuntu ships it as the default suite under Unity...
'It is unique per camera, it says so in the press release which I linked in a separate post.'
I may be missing something, but I can't see this in the press release, so there may well just be a single key. However, every camera model with the image authentication feature also writes its (unencrypted) serial number to an EXIF tag. If image authentication had remained secure, you could have 'proved' which camera took the photo simply by reading the serial number from the metadata of an authenticated image (tampering with the number would invalidate the image).
Slashdot Mirror
"I would think RIAA would demand 3D scanner be illegal to own or operate as it is a device designed to circumvent "copy protection" known as "obsolescence.""
Not to mention circumventing Edison's original media lock technology:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/business/yourmoney/11edison.html?pagewanted=2
"An adapter permitted Victor records to be played on an Edison Disc Phonograph, but Edison forbade the sale of an attachment that permitted his records to be played on competitorsâ(TM) machines."
Of course if you wanted to rip his competitor's discs, you'd probably be violating their EULA - the language doesn't seem to have changed much in a century:
http://www.natch.net/stuff/78_license/
'I wonder exactly how far medicine has been set back by this.'
No measurable distance. The summary is rather misleading and the arXiv article isn't exactly clear, either. The previous letter they reference (and co-author) is clearer:
http://www.biotechniques.com/BiotechniquesJournal/2009/December/Letter-to-the-editor-Unexpected-presence-of-mycoplasma-probes-on-human-microarrays/biotechniques-181035.html?service=print
Basically a couple of tiny fragments have been found in the public DNA sequence databases that were misclassified as human, presumably because they were derived from cDNA 'libraries' constructed from cells contaminated with mycoplasma. These sequences are NOT part of the reference human genome sequence. They exist only as small independent files supposedly representing fragments of genes expressed in human cells:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/af241217
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucest/DA466599
but really mapping to mycoplasma sequences. Unfortunately a commercial provider used one of these files in the (semi-automated) design of a microarray. A probe for a sequence like this (one of many thousands on the array) would generally be harmless, since it does not detect a human sequence. Rather embarrasingly, it did appear to give a positive result in some publicly available data sets from researchers who used the array. This suggests that the cells used by these researchers were also contaminated with mycoplasma. So the problem isn't so much an insidious 'in silico' contamination of databases by bug sequences, but rather the actual contamination of cell cultures by mycoplasma, which suggests sloppy lab technique and a lack of routine testing.
"Also, for you developers out there...can you imagine what would happen to your code if someone started randomly flipping bits in your machine's memory? Would it produce new, useful features? Of course not!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_(genetic_algorithm)
'None of this has a hypothesis I'd be willing to put out, but I think studying first world humans misses some possible independent variables.'
They actually looked at one caucasian and one West African (Yoruba) family. A lot more will need to be analysed to see if the number of new mutations in the children are typical. The authors also recognise that "the distribution of mutation rates in the population could contain a long tail of relatively rare individuals with considerably higher mutation rates (perhaps as a result of genetic or environmental factors)".
'Outrageous is 16gb for $100. SD Cards are too mainstream.'
I suppose component cost has almost nothing to do with it. The 32Gb iPod Touch goes for $299. Sure, the iPhone costs more to make, but $450 more..? They charge whatever they can get away with charging, and the 32Gb phone is the 'premium' model.
http://xkcd.com/908/
'Surely this is a tacit admission that the patent office is not capable of doing it's job?'
Maybe because some of these patents are written in such impenetrable English that they might as well have come from a Cylon base ship hybrid:
http://peertopatent.org.uk/patent/2458182/claim/0003/show
'...wherein prior to initiating encryption of said data said further processing device initiates generation of a secure signature from said data and initiates encryption of said secure signature and storing of said secure signature along with said secure data; and in response to receipt of said signal to resume said task said further processing device initiates retrieval of said encrypted secure signature and decryption of said encrypted secure signature and following decryption of said encrypted secure data initiates generation of said secure signature from said decrypted encrypted data and S comparison of said generated secure signature with said decrypted secure signature; and in response to said generated secure signature not matching said decrypted secure signature said further processing device issues an signal to said data processor to indicate that said data has been tampered with; and in response to said generated secure signature matching said decrypted secure signature said further processing device resumes said task using said decrypted data; mists of dreams drip along the nascent echo and love no more. End of line.'
"Can someone please explain what is the difference between 3.0 and 2.6.40 ?"
Linus: The numbers all go to 3. Look, right across the git repository, 3, 3, 3 and...
Interviewer: Oh, I see. And most kernels go up to 2.6?
Linus: Exactly.
Interviewer: Does that mean it's better? Is it any better?
Linus: Well, it's one better, isn't it? It's not 2. You see, most blokes, you know, will be running 2.x. You're on 2.6 here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on 2.6 on your computer. Where can you go from there? Where?
Interviewer: I don't know.
Linus: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Interviewer: Compile it up to 3.
Linus: 3. Exactly. One better.
Interviewer: Why don't you just make 2.6 better and make 2.6 be the top number and make that a little better?
Linus: [pause] These go to 3.
Yes, much more fun:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/03/03/235257/Upgrading-From-Windows-10-To-Windows-7
http://rasteri.blogspot.com/2011/03/chain-of-fools-upgrading-through-every.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14
Of course it could be worse. It could be the Gnome 3 Shell or Unity...
"It fits on the CD-R allright. For whatever reason, contents of our DNA compresses into a plain old zip file no worst than executables. 50% reduction in size is a fair bet."
I was sad enough to actually try this! UCSC has the genome in a 2 bit per base format (778 MB) which zip or gzip can compress to 675 MB, and 7-Zip to 617 MB. That's just the reference sequence of course - an individual (diploid) human genome has double this information capacity, but since most bases don't change, you can conveniently represent the variants by some sort of diff in very little space ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18996942 ) so the CD should still be enough to hold the lot.
"...an outbreak that would start from where exactly?"
Maybe from here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2404051.stm
or here:
http://www.livescience.com/2403-climate-threat-thawing-tundra-releases-infected-corpses.html
or even here:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2003-12-26-smallpox-in-envelope_x.htm
Can we assume that the declared US and Russian stocks are the last viable samples anywhere on the planet..?
Sanctioning this and allowing it to exist on their servers is pretty extreme:
http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html
http://dailymailoncology.tumblr.com/
http://thedailymailoncologicalontologyproject.wordpress.com/
"No one really knew how far redesigning Perl needed to go to achieve those philosophical goals until the RFCs and Apocalypses started pulling at loose strings in the sweater."
It's certainly easy to criticise all this with the benefit of hindsight - I don't imagine anyone at the time imagined it would turn out to be be such a long, drawn-out process.
No, I didn't mean forget about re-designing the language (and its implementation) altogether and just carry on building on the old, flawed foundation. The goals of Perl 6 seem entirely laudable. I just think that the way this has all been presented to the wider community over the past decade hasn't done Perl any favours. Somehow a (false) impression has been created that Perl 5 is in some sense deprecated, while Perl 6 is not ready. If Perl 6 had been presented from the start as an experimental 'sister language' (perhaps with a different name), rather than being named as Perl 5's successor over a decade early, perhaps the perception would now be different.
Far less significant changes than those that occurred between Perl 5.0 and 5.10 (or 5.14) have been honoured by major version bumps in other software packages, which at least serve to indicate that some new and exciting features are available (which is what I meant by 'better PR'). But this wasn't possible with Perl because a drastically changed language design had already been given the Perl 6 name. Isn't your term 'Modern Perl' itself a way of saying that things have changed a bit since 1993, even though we're still using 'Perl 5'?
"I was just going to say that back in about 2001 someone gave me advice not to learn Perl 5 because a Perl 6 release was imminent."
It's a shame that this 'Osborne effect' has hung over Perl for the last decade. I wonder how Perl 5 would now be perceived if Perl 6 had been given a different name and announced as a research project into language development, rather than the next version of Perl? With better PR, Perl 5.10 could easily have been 'Perl 6'.
All this tends to obscure the quet evolution of Perl 5 programming into what 'chromatic' and others are calling 'Modern Perl', using an idiomatic style that takes full advantage of recent language features (some borrowed from Perl 6) and CPAN to write efficient and maintainable code:
http://www.modernperlbooks.com/
http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/
As always, a lot of the most active development is happening outside the core language. Anyone interested in some of the directions Perl 5 is going in today ought to check out projects like these:
http://www.iinteractive.com/moose/
http://plackperl.org/
http://www.catalystframework.org/
http://mojolicio.us/
...unless you're the Academy of Art University, in which case you just go ahead and convert the bulding into whatever you like:
http://sf.curbed.com/tags/academy-of-art-university
"I want interesting British programming that I might not have seen otherwise."
Well, then we'd actually have to make some, which seems to be too much trouble these days. Dr Who is still OK, but here's the programme they run immediately before it in the UK:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010w1y2
'Dont Scare the Hare - Jason Bradbury presents an innovative family game show packed with humour and jeopardy, and featuring a 4-foot animatronic robot hare...Episode 4/9. Two teams of contestants battle angry frogs and laser-beamed carrots to win 15,000 pounds.'
It's probably 'interesting' after serious LSD intake, but then so is watching the clothes go round in the Economy Wash cycle on laundry day.
"With stuff like observing road signs, you can train yourself to be more attentive to them too. There's not that much point reading them every time on roads you know well, though being aware of possible new signs is useful."
It's probably worth checking the traffic, though:
http://xkcd.com/356/
I suspect Dominic Wilcox's surreal brand of humour is going to be lost in this thread. Yes, he knows it's silly. Check out his other creations:
http://variationsonnormal.com/
"Cost saving 5 plank Fence - sensor detects position of person and moves fence accordingly...You might be asking 'why hasn't anyone thought of this before?' But the garden fence industry is very powerful and they kill any idea that would threaten their plank quantity sales."
I vote for him as Jonathan Ive's successor.
Older readers may remember the excellent QNX Demo Disk, an OS on a bootable floppy complete with windowing system, file browser, editor, and a proper web browser:
http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
http://qnx.projektas.lt/qnxdemo/qnx_demo_disk.htm
Who needs live CDs?
'Was searching for Bin Laden news, found a program called "Fox Tab" in the search results, and discovered this PDF creation tool was actually a trojan.'
Even worse, I was searching for 'MILF' and I got a legitimate news story about Bin Laden:
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/nation/regions/05/02/11/moro-rebels-call-bin-laden-martyr
("...He added that bin Laden's death has no direct effect on the MILF.")
Be careful out there!
One thing the wikipedia article doesn't mention is the distinctive bark of the Labradoodle, an unusual sound often written as 'Whoosh!'
'There's a perfectly good UI paradigm for the desktop that's been around since the 80's...With Windows, some things change sure, but the basic metaphor...has been perfectly good for years and people are used to it.'
I agree, but it looks like MS doesn't:
http://www.withinwindows.com/2011/04/02/windows-8-secrets-windows-explorer-ribbon/
So, with the dreaded Ribbon coming to Windows 8, the dumbed-down Gnome 3 or KDE4 desktop shipped as the default on a Linux distribution near you, and the awful Unity on Ubuntu, have we reached the stage where mainstream user interfaces have actually started to regress? The Xfce guys must be loving this! Meanwhile, imagine the interface hell we'll have when LibreOffice is inevitably ribbonized and Ubuntu ships it as the default suite under Unity...
'It is unique per camera, it says so in the press release which I linked in a separate post.'
I may be missing something, but I can't see this in the press release, so there may well just be a single key. However, every camera model with the image authentication feature also writes its (unencrypted) serial number to an EXIF tag. If image authentication had remained secure, you could have 'proved' which camera took the photo simply by reading the serial number from the metadata of an authenticated image (tampering with the number would invalidate the image).